For a movie about a cancelled TV show, Too Funny to Fail is surprisingly cheerful, in large part owing to the fact that so many of the performers and writers on the show went on to such great comedy heights.

This isn't so much a rise-and-fall story as just a story about a very rapid fall, and even the documentary's participants have trouble taking the subject seriously. But that just makes the stories they tell even funnier.

Not unlike the series, the documentary's secret weapons are [Stephen] Colbert and [Steve] Carell, who are interviewed separately but maintain a connection that eventually broke them for a wide audience on The Daily Show.